Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron Page A

hooked around their ankles, her hands clutching whatever part of their clothing she could grab. The people who worked on the boat would come to move them along, kick them out to join the tour, and Nora would put her head back and scream and not let them rip her from the two people she needed most.
    Mariana noticed, of course. “Is something wrong?”
    “Nah,” said Nora. She flapped the end of the sock.
    “You’re never going to finish knitting that thing.” Mariana drew back as a child raced past. “And I don’t believe you.”
    Nora smiled at her sister. “It’s nothing. Nothing much. Tell you later.”

Chapter Fourteen
    “E
n arrivant à Alcatraz, on donnait chaque prisonnier une carte de bibliothèque et une liste de livres disponibles.”
    The library was Nora’s favorite part of the Alcatraz tour—it always had been. She loved standing there, listening to the narrator talk about the prisoners who had read behind the most infamous bars in the nation. The high ceiling above her, the narrow shelves, the complete lack of seating sans one hard wooden bench—all of it made it real. For the men in Alcatraz, if they’d read in the library, there would have been no lounging on a couch, feet up on extra cushions, a glass of hot tea at hand. Nora thought longingly of her own living room.
    Nora wandered with the group, looking up to where the grenade blast was still visible in the ceiling from when the jail was taken over by six prisoners. She’d heard the audio narration so many times that last time she’d gotten the Spanish version. This time, French.
“Les prisonniers pouvaient emprunter des magazines aussi, cependant on déchirait les pages avec les nouvelles de crime,et les journaux étaient interdits.”
She wasn’t very good at either language, but she caught a lot of it. Mariana, still fluent from the two years she’d lived there, had chosen German. Only Ellie had gone with the tried-and-true English version.
    This was Ellie’s trip, really. It had been her turn to choose what they did for Easter, and she’d always been fascinated by Alcatraz. “I like thinking about them,” Ellie would say, “because most people don’t think about them anymore. I can’t get them out of my mind, those men sitting in solitary confinement in D Block, watching the lights of the city.”
    They were criminals, Nora would point out gently. They’d done things to deserve to be there.
    “But some of them were innocent.”
    Nora couldn’t deny that. Some of them probably had been.
    Ellie’s eyes would fill up with tears. “Imagine them, away from their families, so close they could hear the music from dances on the Embarcadero. I read that some nights they could smell women’s perfume if the wind was right. And they were here, alone.” Nora and Mariana would gently tease her, but they loved this about her—her tenderness. Her empathy.
    Now Ellie had that moony look again at the end of the tour, the same one she always got. “Can we stay?”
    Mariana said, “Or we could go back and get clam chowder in a bread bowl.”
    Nora’s stomach rumbled.
    “Please? The next ferry leaves in an hour, and we could wander around outside.”
    “It’s pretty dreary out there,” Nora pointed out.
    “But it stopped raining, and that’s why we’re wearing coats,” said Ellie. “Please?”
    Mariana said, “I don’t mind if you don’t, Nora. We can take our coffee out and talk.”
You can tell me why you’re being weird.
She didn’t have to say it for Nora to hear it.
    Nora couldn’t tell them. Not here. What had she been thinking?That she would introduce them to a brand-new personal grief in the place where so much sadness had lived for so long? “Okay,” she managed.
    At the door that led outside, a woman with a purple stripe in her black hair touched Nora’s elbow. “Excuse me. I’m sorry, but aren’t you Nora Glass?”
    Nora swallowed. “Yes.” She was. Wasn’t she?
    The woman broke into a delighted laugh.